Assyrtiko, Now an American Treat

I was excited and pleased to offer last month’s Wine School assignment: assyrtiko from the Greek island of Santorini. The response was mostly enthusiastic, but a few readers were puzzled or even annoyed.

“Now really out on the fringe,” wrote Leading Edge Boomer of Santa Fe, N.M. “Wines like these are simply not going to be available in 95 percent of the country. Has this series run out of subject matter? Nevertheless, have a fine time, N.Y.C. people.”

I empathize with Boomer. These wines are widely distributed, though not in Santa Fe, according to the useful website Wine-Searcher. I lament the lack of access. Boomer’s complaint illustrates how much the world of wine has changed in the last 15 years, and how far it still has to go.

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CreditSerge Bloch

Back in 2000, assyrtiko (pronounced ah-SEER-tee-koh) was indeed out on the fringe. But it’s obscure no more, and it’s hardly the property of an elite few big cities. It’s available all around the country, with the exception of several states. That is not because assyrtiko is rare, but because of a ridiculously archaic American distribution system in which each state has its own rules and licensing requirements.

The availability of once-esoteric wines like assyrtiko makes this an exciting time in which to love wine. Yet the pace of change has been so rapid that many wine texts still reflect a narrower, 20th-century view of the world. Here at Wine School, we’re not exactly rewriting the texts. But we are trying to take a comprehensive view of the fundamentally distinctive sorts of wine available today, regardless of whether they bear the seal of historical approval. Assyrtiko is a case in point.

Here’s how Wine School works: Each month, I select a genre of wine and recommend three good examples along with some alternatives. You are invited to buy one or more of those wines and drink them in a comfortable, relaxed setting, with food and family or friends, paying close attention to your own reactions. The idea is not to reduce the wine to a score or a set of tasting impressions, but to judge how it fulfilled its role of providing refreshment and pleasure. Did it enhance the meal? Did it perhaps offer some intellectual stimulation beyond the basics? I encourage you to share your thoughts with others following along at nytimes.com/food.

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CreditSerge Bloch

Why assyrtiko? It’s a relatively recent international arrival, but that’s not the reason. Santorini has been making wine for centuries. No, the reason for paying attention is because it’s distinctive and original, and it’s good. It’s the same reason we were drawn to grüner veltliner, which a decade before assyrtiko lingered in similar obscurity. Now grüner veltliner is a familiar feature in retail shops and on restaurant wine lists, even though its production is still limited almost entirely to parts of Austria.

What makes assyrtiko distinctive? First, Santorini is a singular site, a large lump of volcanic rock in the Aegean Sea buffeted constantly by winds and touched only rarely by rain. To protect against the winds, assyrtiko vines are trained in basket-like coils that hug the ground. Over decades, the vines are curled around themselves several times. Eventually, nutrients have to travel so far to reach the leaves and fruit that yields can become very low, at which point the vines are pruned at the base of the trunk and the training begins anew. The root systems of many vines on Santorini may be centuries old.

Winemakers could easily turn those grapes into something generic. Fortunately, Santorini has producers who prize the distinctiveness of their terroir and who make their wines to show it off rather than obscure it. Each of the three Santorini assyrtikos I selected — the Argyros, the Hatzidakis and the Gai’a Wild Ferment, all from 2014 — was distinctive in its own way.

All had a texture that was creamy but with an unusual feature that I described as “prickly,” a sensation that reminded me of the dancing-in-my-mouth feeling I get from Sichuan peppercorns. The Argyros seemed the most sedate of the three, a calm but pleasing combination of creaminess, stony minerality and citrus flavors that seemed to rest on the tongue rather than move about.

By contrast, the Hatzidakis was racier, with similar flavors though with greater depth and energy. The Gai’a, too, seemed more alive and precise in its flavors. Both the Hatzidakis and the Gai’a had another quality: Their flavors seemed to linger in the mouth. The Argyros seemed to have a narrower bandwidth. I liked all three wines, but the Hatzidakis and the Gai’a a little more.

A few readers had enjoyed these wines before. But more shared a sense of welcome discovery. Not surprisingly, some grasped for more familiar wines to use as yardsticks. Ferguson of Princeton, N.J., who tried all three wines, said they had “energy and lightness without being bland,” and were reminiscent of Sancerre. Cathy Corison, the great Napa Valley winemaker, said she was taken by the Gai’a; Chablis in a ripe vintage came to mind.

As others have observed, Sancerre and Chablis, though made from different grapes (sauvignon blanc and chardonnay), are grown in places that share geological features and can easily be confused in blind tastings. I can see why assyrtiko would suggest both of these wines; they all share the feature of maritime minerality, that maddeningly general term that covers a broad range of rocky, stony, earthy flavors.

Other readers could not find analogous wines, emphasizing their singular nature. In the Hatzidakis, Dan Barron of New York found “sea-swept stoniness,” and called it “a distinctive wine, like none I could name.”

Perhaps without much imagination, I had suggested a range of seafoods, Greek salads and spreads as good matches for assyrtiko. But I found that the wines could be much more versatile, pairing well with a chicken dish as well as with risotto with pancetta and watermelon. VSB of San Francisco discovered that the Hatzidakis was a great match for a Thai dish, shrimp and coconut curry.

Clearly, we have a great deal still to discover about assyrtiko. Does it age well? Speaking on “I’ll Drink to That!,” the excellent series of Levi Dalton wine podcasts, Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, the proprietor of Gai’a, suggested that because of its great acidity, assyrtiko can age beautifully for decades. If so, how does it evolve?

Assyrtiko from Santorini will never be as ubiquitous as chardonnay or sauvignon blanc, or maybe even grüner veltliner. But it’s a great example of the wonderful wines that have become more widely available to Americans over the last decade. These wines may not be easy for everybody to find, but I submit that there’s great value in knowing they exist, and learning about them even if only vicariously. You may not see a bottle today or next week. But you may next month, or next year, and when you do, you can expect with good reason that you have a treat in store.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the type of grape used to make Chablis. It is chardonnay, not Chablis.